Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
First Advisor
Barringer, Tim
Abstract
This dissertation is the first in English to consider how artists primarily from Russia’s Partnership for Traveling Art Exhibitions, known as the Wanderers, wandered. It breaks with decades of scholarship portraying these painters as pleinarist populists who went to the people, or bourgeois professionals who stayed home. Although the Wanderers rarely accompanied their group’s eponymous Traveling Exhibition as it toured by rail, the artists remained exceptionally mobile over their careers in both the literal and extended notions of this word. How did these artists exploit the accelerations of the late nineteenth century to advance their ambitions, reproduce and circulate their art, and move the masses in line with realist philosophy? How did the form and content of their canvases express the complications of traveling as others stayed behind, or of being forced to go? Chapter 1 interprets Konstantin Savitsky’s Repair Work on the Railroad as a performance of labor as he was denied the right to work. Vacationing in the country after being disbarred from the state competition for a travel grant to Europe, Savitsky was powerfully attracted to the toil of itinerant earth-diggers renewing the railways upon which he rode to his destination. Savitsky used this imagery for a journeyman canvas that financed his own Grand Tour and qualified him in the eyes of Russia’s professional art community. Yet Savitsky stayed conscious that he went places via the likenesses and the literal efforts of the figures he drew. The chapter tracks how the problematics of tourism and self-advancement at the expense of others colored Savitsky’s art for the next decade. Chapter 2 explores art inspired by the largest personnel movement in Russia in this period: the military mobilization for the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. It re-evaluates the pastoral paintings of Vasily Polenov as dialectically informed by his sojourns through Bulgaria during the eviction of Ottoman subjects from their homesteads. Military painter Vasily Vereshchagin also used landscape imagery to critique the performance of Russia’s army in the conflict. The chapter takes the unusual step of analyzing a large number of engravings—1700 in total—from mass circulation periodicals to reconstitute the visual imaginary within which Vereshchagin conceived his pictures of frozen, starving prisoners marooned in an inhospitable surround. He painted the collapse of the modern maneuver warfare confidently sold to readers in the press. Chapter 3 contrasts paintings of the 1883 Kremlin illumination by Vasily Surikov and Aleksei Bogoliubov to show how experiences of mobility translate into stylistic differences. For Surikov, repeatedly swept up by the crowds of St. Petersburg after relocating there from Siberia for art school, the modern electrotechnical display proved a site of artistic experimentation. Savitsky ultimately produced an exuberant, intimate oil sketch of the event. For Russia’s informal chargé d’affaires of student painters on scholarship in Paris, Bogoliubov—a man widely-traveled, but used to moving in a network of close relations—such mass spectacle was exhausting. He painted the illumination in the style of the nocturne: a genre of lento, or slowness capable of arresting the spitfire visual culture of fun-fairs and illustrated journals to which it belonged. Finally, Chapter 4 looks at aesthetic judgment in an empire where transportation was punishment and painters could be detained for their making. It examines Vladimir Makovsky’s picture of a prisoner being hustled out of a courthouse as meant to move beholders to tears and compel them to overturn the protagonist’s exile in the cassational court of public opinion and art criticism. The painter Nikolai Iaroshenko however had to insist the final verdict about the meaning of his art resided exclusively with him in order to escape house arrest following the untimely vernissage of his canvas Litovsky Fortress. Ultimately, this dissertation seeks not only to advance original readings of art by seminal Wanderers largely unknown to the West, but to revise narratives about Russia’s allegedly late arrival to modernity. Realist art registered new tempos of industrialization across a wide range of everyday genre settings. Its preference for rustic themes is not evidence of backwardness. Rather, it recognizes the nineteenth century’s general speedup impacted every quarter of life, that the inputs and labor relations needed to sustain it were obfuscated and naturalized, and that transport was a quintessential capitalist commodity.
Recommended Citation
Urchick, Stephen Tyler, "Realism by Rail: Art and Mobilities in Late Imperial Russia" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 961.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/961
